MC2: A cryptocurrency based on a hybrid PoW/PoS system

[Cheshyr]

Been thinkin' about names. Just brainstorming.

The name of this coin doesn't have to follow the cheesy format of : " Use a noun that describes the difference with bitcoin and add the "-coin" suffix. The name doesn't even have to describe what it does. Here are some things I think are important :

It's...

-Memorable,
-Unique

I've been looking at names of coins for some inspiration. What I think would be cool is to name it after an ancient coin, or a substance/material with some nice attributes. The latter would also provide ideas for nice icons.

How about : Electrum

It's the alloy that was used for -what is believed to be- the oldest coin in history, the first coin. http://oldestcoins.reidgold.com/article.html

Wouldn't it be cool if it became the name of the first true mainstream cryptocoin ?

I believe Electrum was one of the earliest AltCoins.  Good idea though.  I'm likely going to name one of my AltCoins a Denarius or Aureus, and another just *.  Of course, you're welcome to any of those names, TacoTime.

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[Daegalus]

Tacotime, this looks great. Did a quick skim through the whitepaper.

If you need any Python, Java, or Web work, I am willing to chip in a bit of time to work on it. I can help with P2Pool stuff, and so on.

Count me in as someone that is very interested.

Oh, obligatory name suggestions:

Beercoin (BRC) - Bottle of Beer icon
Cloudcoin (CC or CDC) - Icon can be a cloud
Skycoin (SC or SKC or SKY) - also can be a cloud
Mint (MT) - Mint leaf
PanicCoin (PAC) - and people that use it, can be called PAC Men/Women!
OrangeCoin (OC) - inside of a cut orange.

[chriswen]

Unless you plan on asking for ID, your democracy will be gamed.

if you read the whitepaper the democracy is based off of solving blocks.

So that the person with the bigger hashrate has more say, sounds like the democracy we already have.

not exactly.  People would join pools based on their economic views.

[digitalmagus]

Hi tacotime,

Finally, somebody working on a coin that substantially improves upon bitcoin, and is not just another copy/paste clone with a few changed parameters. I'm not a cryptologist or a programmer, but I'd like to provide some real world input where IMO bitcoin is failing and where improvement is seriously needed for mass adoption or longevity of the currency is to become a reality. Here's a few things to consider improving:

1) Transaction times - Starbucks, gas station and grocery lineups (something many of us deal with daily) are long enough as it is, can you imagine the patience of people in a lineup to wait for your 10 minute cryptocoin transaction to go through?! Or imagine on black Friday, you need to purchase that $1,000 flatscreen and BestBuy makes you wait for 6 confirmations (~1hour) before approving the transaction. We BADLY need transaction times to be 30 seconds or less, ideally on par or better than credit cards. This IMO is the #1 hurdle to mass adoption. Who the heck wants to wait around to pay for something? And which business owner wants less customers because they are too frustrated waiting around to buy something?

2) Network Security - Please don't make the same mistake as bitcoin and use a single TCP port that can be shut down on a firewall in less than 1 minute. Imagine the currency gets too popular and government somehow passes a law to shut it down under some false pretense (ZOMG its used by Al-queida and drugdealers!). Bitcoin can be shut down overnight by blocking TCP port 8333 at all Tier1 ISPs. The counter argument of the bitcoin developers is extremely poor, in that, there's other open source software such as TOR or i2p that bitcoin could function through... but that assumes that bitcoin would even survive the TCP port shutdown attack which is pretty much cost free to the government. Look at Mtgox.. it gets DDOS'ed for a few hours and bitcoin value crashes by 70%+. Now imagine a firewall rule that blocks bitcoin at the Tier1 ISP backbone level, and 95% of the users who don't have a clue about Tor or i2P (or 99.9999% of non-tech users), and you can bet the currency will crash to near ZERO and be finished. In other words, include proper network layer security from day 1 ! This is far more important that trying to figure out how to prevent complex 51% attacks. This costs ZERO money for the government and ISPs to do, every ISP already has firewalls as part of their core and edge infrastructure. And if you think the USA would never pass such a law to enact the crushing of a popular competing currency... well then think about the other 190+ countries on this planet that may pass such laws with far less hesitation.

3) ASIC security - Using 8 different sCrypt algorithms somewhat randomly is an improvement, but what's to prevent mining software from rejecting anything but type 1 Scrypt algo block and mining only those? This would result in at least 8 different types of ASICs needed, sure, but not ASIC proof, IMO. Alternatively, you could still create an ASIC that could direct mining to one of 8 segments of the ASIC and still be much faster than GPU mining. This would mean you have a much more complex ASIC design and 1/8th the potential crunching power, but still many orders of magnitude better than PC/GPUs/FPGAs. So my suggestion is please don't think like Bill Gates that 640K or.. 8 algos should be enough. Why not make it 4096+ of them and outright discourage any kind of ASIC... ever. My concern with ASICs isn't even somebody trying to make a lot of money faster than others, but rather government 3 letter agencies throwing 1 Billion printed dollars at the problem creating an ASIC farm, and killing the coin altogether. The NSA just built a 2 billion dollar data center in 2012. With a Homeland security budget in the Trillions, 1 billion is like petty cash, and you can bet that preventing the US dollar from collapse against popularity gaining crypto currencies  is a homeland security issue.

4) The 5th grader problem - Let's face it, Joe 6 pack can't do basic math, he is not smarter than a 5th grader, even less so in 3rd world countries where education is seriously lacking. DON'T fractionalize the coins into ridiculous numbers of decimal places, or make people use 8 different fractional acronyms mBTC, satoshi's etc. The major problem with bitcoin from gaining mass adoption is that it is seriously not adhering to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. You think in 10 years, your average person is really going to understand or want to deal with .000004 bitcoins? Please consider the Brazilian solution. Brazil in the past few decades had  severe bouts of high inflation in their "Real" currency... after the inflation got too high, i.e. the number of ZEROs on the notes got too be too many they simply issued a new currency and said something like 1,000 of the old Real's are now worth 1 of the new issued Real's. This didn't solve the high inflation issues of course, but it's a simple solution that could solve trying to deal with .24056794 bitcoins to buy a loaf of bread.

5) Anonymity Improvements - I'm not sure why satoshi only went 1/2 way to make the bitcoin anonymous. Clearly he didn't go far enough in the eyes of many. There are now all kinds of academics studying the bitcoin blockchain and trying to figure out who has how many coins (including satoshi himself), and where they live. Look, blockchain.info can identify a user's aproximate location and map it: http://blockchain.info/tx/58d961336f14d3c8305dfe193c5e00ac00a3a9de21aa605ee701da714fb1657c
Please prevent identifying user's IP and thus geo location. I know IPs aren't in the blockchain, but they can and are apparently being collected by major nodes  - this could be mitigated by having bitcoin work within a TOR like system. Probably there are many other anonymity improvements that can be made, I am just mentioning the most glaring one for me.

6) Wishlist - I honestly don't understand 80% of the items on this bitcoin improvement wish list, but seriously consider implementing the best ones because from my understanding, once a coin gets too popular, the risk of making any major changes becomes ever bigger, and thus innovation will stall. In other words, get it right from the get go as much as possible, because hardforks are not popular. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

7) Hardforks - Why are hardforks so hard on the system? Chrome and IE now force automatic updates upon 100's of millions of users, with little seeming repercussions... why not do the same with your coin? If auto-updates are not somehow possible, then establish a coin-holiday, or several a year (say 1 major update opportunity per quarter), where all clients/miners must update to the new patch-level whose details of course would be pre-announced. Also, if you can, think of a way to establish an Emergency change system in case something goes horribly wrong by accident.

8 ) SatoshiDice blockchain pollution - Please figure out a way that the blockchain doesn't get polluted with 5 million .00001 transactions per day. Please discourage ridiculous micro transactions. Micro transactions are definitely wanted, but not millions of them by the same entity. What % of the blockchain now is satoshidice garbage ? Maybe have a transaction fee that is high enough to prevent excessive number of small transactions.

9) The Mega Blockchain problem - Is there any viable way to prevent the blockchain from growing into Terabytes of size? Can we not archive it every X years or every X gigabytes or something ? I mean, sure storage is cheap these days and bandwidths are getting higher, but think like a Chinese government in loooong timespans. In 200 years, how large might the blockchain be? 5 billion petabytes ? Hopefully we won't hit a technological wall of storage or bandwidth along the way resulting in the crash of the currency because no more transactions can be added to the blockchain, because every user would have to own their own private data center.

10) Democratic voting of interest rates - I'm not sure this is such a good idea, with humanity being what it is. The lowest common denominator would always win, and this is rarely the best decision that can be made.  This is readily evident in today's government formations. Nobody goes on a campaign trail announcing massive necessary spending cuts, increases in taxes or interest rates, because none of the constituents in their right mind want less money. Likewise, if people could vote on things like interest rates, they would always vote for whatever is best for them right now, not for the survival of the system in the long run. Thus, I think satoshi had it right in that the problem with fiat is that it is controlled by humans, and the advantage of bitcoin is that everyone can trust an intelligent algorithm. As the philosophers proclaim (paraphrase): Genius does not belong the majority, it is the inherent attribute of the rarest of human. .... fortunately for us, we can work hard at making a genius algorithm.

Thanks for your consideration and best of luck with your new coin! I'm keeping one eye on it :-)
DigitalMagus

[mr_random]

Oh, obligatory name suggestions:

Beercoin (BRC) - Bottle of Beer icon

I believe beercoin has been done already 

[MyZhre]

Mathril,
Couldn't be better

[wtman]

Maybe make the coin a consistent generation coin depending upon contribution of processing power, not like the current lottery system so that pools are not very popular and thus a couple of big pools don't control the whole thing.

Hope that made sense

[Praxis]

Maybe make the coin a consistent generation coin depending upon contribution of processing power, not like the current lottery system so that pools are not very popular and thus a couple of big pools don't control the whole thing.

Hope that made sense

Makes perfect sense. Good idea imo.

[Joerii]

Hi tacotime,

Finally, somebody working on a coin that substantially improves upon bitcoin, and is not just another copy/paste clone with a few changed parameters. I'm not a cryptologist or a programmer, but I'd like to provide some real world input where IMO bitcoin is failing and where improvement is seriously needed for mass adoption or longevity of the currency is to become a reality. Here's a few things to consider improving:

1) Transaction times - Starbucks, gas station and grocery lineups (something many of us deal with daily) are long enough as it is, can you imagine the patience of people in a lineup to wait for your 10 minute cryptocoin transaction to go through?! Or imagine on black Friday, you need to purchase that $1,000 flatscreen and BestBuy makes you wait for 6 confirmations (~1hour) before approving the transaction. We BADLY need transaction times to be 30 seconds or less, ideally on par or better than credit cards. This IMO is the #1 hurdle to mass adoption. Who the heck wants to wait around to pay for something? And which business owner wants less customers because they are too frustrated waiting around to buy something?

2) Network Security - Please don't make the same mistake as bitcoin and use a single TCP port that can be shut down on a firewall in less than 1 minute. Imagine the currency gets too popular and government somehow passes a law to shut it down under some false pretense (ZOMG its used by Al-queida and drugdealers!). Bitcoin can be shut down overnight by blocking TCP port 8333 at all Tier1 ISPs. The counter argument of the bitcoin developers is extremely poor, in that, there's other open source software such as TOR or i2p that bitcoin could function through... but that assumes that bitcoin would even survive the TCP port shutdown attack which is pretty much cost free to the government. Look at Mtgox.. it gets DDOS'ed for a few hours and bitcoin value crashes by 70%+. Now imagine a firewall rule that blocks bitcoin at the Tier1 ISP backbone level, and 95% of the users who don't have a clue about Tor or i2P (or 99.9999% of non-tech users), and you can bet the currency will crash to near ZERO and be finished. In other words, include proper network layer security from day 1 ! This is far more important that trying to figure out how to prevent complex 51% attacks. This costs ZERO money for the government and ISPs to do, every ISP already has firewalls as part of their core and edge infrastructure. And if you think the USA would never pass such a law to enact the crushing of a popular competing currency... well then think about the other 190+ countries on this planet that may pass such laws with far less hesitation.

3) ASIC security - Using 8 different sCrypt algorithms somewhat randomly is an improvement, but what's to prevent mining software from rejecting anything but type 1 Scrypt algo block and mining only those? This would result in at least 8 different types of ASICs needed, sure, but not ASIC proof, IMO. Alternatively, you could still create an ASIC that could direct mining to one of 8 segments of the ASIC and still be much faster than GPU mining. This would mean you have a much more complex ASIC design and 1/8th the potential crunching power, but still many orders of magnitude better than PC/GPUs/FPGAs. So my suggestion is please don't think like Bill Gates that 640K or.. 8 algos should be enough. Why not make it 4096+ of them and outright discourage any kind of ASIC... ever. My concern with ASICs isn't even somebody trying to make a lot of money faster than others, but rather government 3 letter agencies throwing 1 Billion printed dollars at the problem creating an ASIC farm, and killing the coin altogether. The NSA just built a 2 billion dollar data center in 2012. With a Homeland security budget in the Trillions, 1 billion is like petty cash, and you can bet that preventing the US dollar from collapse against popularity gaining crypto currencies  is a homeland security issue.

4) The 5th grader problem - Let's face it, Joe 6 pack can't do basic math, he is not smarter than a 5th grader, even less so in 3rd world countries where education is seriously lacking. DON'T fractionalize the coins into ridiculous numbers of decimal places, or make people use 8 different fractional acronyms mBTC, satoshi's etc. The major problem with bitcoin from gaining mass adoption is that it is seriously not adhering to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. You think in 10 years, your average person is really going to understand or want to deal with .000004 bitcoins? Please consider the Brazilian solution. Brazil in the past few decades had  severe bouts of high inflation in their "Real" currency... after the inflation got too high, i.e. the number of ZEROs on the notes got too be too many they simply issued a new currency and said something like 1,000 of the old Real's are now worth 1 of the new issued Real's. This didn't solve the high inflation issues of course, but it's a simple solution that could solve trying to deal with .24056794 bitcoins to buy a loaf of bread.

5) Anonymity Improvements - I'm not sure why satoshi only went 1/2 way to make the bitcoin anonymous. Clearly he didn't go far enough in the eyes of many. There are now all kinds of academics studying the bitcoin blockchain and trying to figure out who has how many coins (including satoshi himself), and where they live. Look, blockchain.info can identify a user's aproximate location and map it: http://blockchain.info/tx/58d961336f14d3c8305dfe193c5e00ac00a3a9de21aa605ee701da714fb1657c
Please prevent identifying user's IP and thus geo location. I know IPs aren't in the blockchain, but they can and are apparently being collected by major nodes  - this could be mitigated by having bitcoin work within a TOR like system. Probably there are many other anonymity improvements that can be made, I am just mentioning the most glaring one for me.

6) Wishlist - I honestly don't understand 80% of the items on this bitcoin improvement wish list, but seriously consider implementing the best ones because from my understanding, once a coin gets too popular, the risk of making any major changes becomes ever bigger, and thus innovation will stall. In other words, get it right from the get go as much as possible, because hardforks are not popular. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

7) Hardforks - Why are hardforks so hard on the system? Chrome and IE now force automatic updates upon 100's of millions of users, with little seeming repercussions... why not do the same with your coin? If auto-updates are not somehow possible, then establish a coin-holiday, or several a year (say 1 major update opportunity per quarter), where all clients/miners must update to the new patch-level whose details of course would be pre-announced. Also, if you can, think of a way to establish an Emergency change system in case something goes horribly wrong by accident.

8 ) SatoshiDice blockchain pollution - Please figure out a way that the blockchain doesn't get polluted with 5 million .00001 transactions per day. Please discourage ridiculous micro transactions. Micro transactions are definitely wanted, but not millions of them by the same entity. What % of the blockchain now is satoshidice garbage ? Maybe have a transaction fee that is high enough to prevent excessive number of small transactions.

9) The Mega Blockchain problem - Is there any viable way to prevent the blockchain from growing into Terabytes of size? Can we not archive it every X years or every X gigabytes or something ? I mean, sure storage is cheap these days and bandwidths are getting higher, but think like a Chinese government in loooong timespans. In 200 years, how large might the blockchain be? 5 billion petabytes ? Hopefully we won't hit a technological wall of storage or bandwidth along the way resulting in the crash of the currency because no more transactions can be added to the blockchain, because every user would have to own their own private data center.

10) Democratic voting of interest rates - I'm not sure this is such a good idea, with humanity being what it is. The lowest common denominator would always win, and this is rarely the best decision that can be made.  This is readily evident in today's government formations. Nobody goes on a campaign trail announcing massive necessary spending cuts, increases in taxes or interest rates, because none of the constituents in their right mind want less money. Likewise, if people could vote on things like interest rates, they would always vote for whatever is best for them right now, not for the survival of the system in the long run. Thus, I think satoshi had it right in that the problem with fiat is that it is controlled by humans, and the advantage of bitcoin is that everyone can trust an intelligent algorithm. As the philosophers proclaim (paraphrase): Genius does not belong the majority, it is the inherent attribute of the rarest of human. .... fortunately for us, we can work hard at making a genius algorithm.

Thanks for your consideration and best of luck with your new coin! I'm keeping one eye on it :-)
DigitalMagus

Wow. What an incredibly insightful post. I had no idea that bitcoin could be blocked by ISP's so easily. That vulnerability as well as the danger of a large entity dropping a billion or two on a bitcoin breaking farm should be addressed ASAP in my opinion, it should be on top of the list.

Imagine what would happen to MC2, hardened against these vulnerabilities , when BTC starts getting attacked exactly that way ? It would skyrocket in market cap and crypto currency could live to fight another day.

By the way... I love Mint for a name

[j980]

2) Network Security - Please don't make the same mistake as bitcoin and use a single TCP port that can be shut down on a firewall in less than 1 minute. Imagine the currency gets too popular and government somehow passes a law to shut it down under some false pretense (ZOMG its used by Al-queida and drugdealers!). Bitcoin can be shut down overnight by blocking TCP port 8333 at all Tier1 ISPs. The counter argument of the bitcoin developers is extremely poor, in that, there's other open source software such as TOR or i2p that bitcoin could function through... but that assumes that bitcoin would even survive the TCP port shutdown attack which is pretty much cost free to the government. Look at Mtgox.. it gets DDOS'ed for a few hours and bitcoin value crashes by 70%+. Now imagine a firewall rule that blocks bitcoin at the Tier1 ISP backbone level, and 95% of the users who don't have a clue about Tor or i2P (or 99.9999% of non-tech users), and you can bet the currency will crash to near ZERO and be finished. In other words, include proper network layer security from day 1 ! This is far more important that trying to figure out how to prevent complex 51% attacks. This costs ZERO money for the government and ISPs to do, every ISP already has firewalls as part of their core and edge infrastructure. And if you think the USA would never pass such a law to enact the crushing of a popular competing currency... well then think about the other 190+ countries on this planet that may pass such laws with far less hesitation.

yeah, that's a really important issue.  But how do you suggest to fix it?  Use tor/i2p by default?  Or did you have other suggestions in mind?

[j980]

1) Transaction times - Starbucks, gas station and grocery lineups (something many of us deal with daily) are long enough as it is, can you imagine the patience of people in a lineup to wait for your 10 minute cryptocoin transaction to go through?! Or imagine on black Friday, you need to purchase that $1,000 flatscreen and BestBuy makes you wait for 6 confirmations (~1hour) before approving the transaction. We BADLY need transaction times to be 30 seconds or less, ideally on par or better than credit cards. This IMO is the #1 hurdle to mass adoption. Who the heck wants to wait around to pay for something? And which business owner wants less customers because they are too frustrated waiting around to buy something?

I think this can be solved as follows:

Rather than having a single blockchain, use a hierarchy (L0 : L1 : L2 : L3 ...) of blockchains.  Then we could for example set
Difficulty of Level (i + 1) = alpha * (Difficult of Level i)
where alpha is for example equal to 0.25

This would mean the time to generate a block at level i + 1 would also be approximately equal to (the time to generate a block at level i) * alpha.

When a new block is found on level i, we start a new blockchain on level i + 1 using the hash of the new block of level i as the genesis block of the new blockchain of level i + 1.  The transactions are processed in the same way as before in the blockchain of the highest level.  To generate a block at level i, all transactions that are included in the blockchain at level i + 1 should be combined into a single transaction at level i.

This has the following advantages:

• Automated blockchain compression: If the higher level contains multiple transactions between A and B, these are compressed into a single transaction.  If A sends coins to B and B sends the same amount of coins to C, it is not even necessary to include B in the transaction at all.
  
• Reduced performance requirements for the point-of-sale devices.  Since the blocks at higher levels are easier to generate, the devices that generate blocks here can be simpler.
  

This way, we get both shorter transaction times for POS devices, while avoiding excessive blockchain size.

If the different levels use the same algorithm, the reward for finding a block can be based on the relative difficulty at the different levels.

Feel free to point out any obvious flaws in this idea.  If some of the dinosaurs roaming around here know this idea has been proposed before, I'm really sorry for suggesting it.

Edit: So, I think this should solve, or at least reduce the negative effect of the following problems in your list too:

8 ) SatoshiDice blockchain pollution - Please figure out a way that the blockchain doesn't get polluted with 5 million .00001 transactions per day. Please discourage ridiculous micro transactions. Micro transactions are definitely wanted, but not millions of them by the same entity. What % of the blockchain now is satoshidice garbage ? Maybe have a transaction fee that is high enough to prevent excessive number of small transactions.

9) The Mega Blockchain problem - Is there any viable way to prevent the blockchain from growing into Terabytes of size? Can we not archive it every X years or every X gigabytes or something ? I mean, sure storage is cheap these days and bandwidths are getting higher, but think like a Chinese government in loooong timespans. In 200 years, how large might the blockchain be? 5 billion petabytes ? Hopefully we won't hit a technological wall of storage or bandwidth along the way resulting in the crash of the currency because no more transactions can be added to the blockchain, because every user would have to own their own private data center.

[bnogal]

As i am thinking about developing a cripto currency experiment with some type of intelligence....  and as one of the aims is to have some type of "vote", i can offer myself to help in this development.

I have been some years working with Qt/C++ , feel free to contact me.

[Benny1985]

One thing I would throw out there: I think that having a large number of coins generated per block will be far more useful for the development of the coin than if the blocks are indeed 12.5 coins/block. Look at the adoption of Feathercoin for proof: People want whole numbers, not satoshis.

IMO, the base unit should be 0.01, which should be the de-facto TX for any and all fees. And like others have said, a minimum transaction number would be useful at that sort of level, as it'd get rid of spammy transactions.

[human]

Maybe make the coin a consistent generation coin depending upon contribution of processing power, not like the current lottery system so that pools are not very popular and thus a couple of big pools don't control the whole thing.

Hope that made sense

Makes perfect sense. Good idea imo.

This is very important!

[Michael_S]

It seems the intent of the democracy is to enable human feedback into what is otherwise a fixed algorithm.  The word Democracy carries too much baggage; we should probably change it to be more literal... I can only think of engineering terms at the moment, but it's just a community feedback module.

Human intervention is exactly what systems like bitcoin are trying to protect against.

I believe that a currency that is fully programmatically controlled is doomed to failure.  We need some means of correcting for errors, societal changes, technological changes, etc.  We're only human; we can't see the future.

One thought experiment:

Imagine Bitcoin suffers a 51% attack tomorrow. What would happen? (a) or (b)?
(a) The Bitcoin community shuts down Bitcoin since the Bitcoin system was "cracked". Nobody uses Bitcoin any more, the blockchain has become worthless garbage.
(b) The core developers publish a new version of Bitcoin client 1.0 that starts off from the blockchain at the last block before the 51% attack happened. Version 1.0 introduces a PoS aspect into the Bitcoin protocol maybe similar to the proposal of post #99 in this thread, such that whoever made the 51% attack will likely be unable to do it again.

If (b) happens, users have two choices:
(1) Accepting Bitcoin 1.0 and work with it, as before (both miners and users). Some may have lost some value from the 51% attack since the new Bitcoin 1.0 starts over from some blocks back in history before the attack. But the majority of funds from the majority of users are still there.
(2) Rejecting Bitcoin 1.0 and rather accept that Bitcoin was hacked and all their Bitcoin savings are worthless now.

Personally, I think that "(b)-->(1)" is the most likely outcome. There is too much value/market cap. in Bitcoin, so the incentive of "someone" (core Bitcoin developers, or others) coming up with a (b)-like solution is very high. And so is the incentive of accepting a (b)-like solution, i.e. behaving (1)-like.

In that respect, I agree with Cheshyr. Just a thought.

[Operatr]

Watching this closely 

Nice to see an altcoin that isn't just a slightly reworked Bitcoin/Litecoin, but actually has something unique to offer. These kinds of alt's will go far, I think most of the others will be fun in practice but will die eventually without adoption, or at least surviving as a kind of "crypto-commodity", actually mimicking gold in the way they are traded for "spending coins" like BTC and held like precious metals and stones, but themselves not really accepted anywhere individually (merchant's arn't going to want to have to accept 20 kinds of coin without a much better way to do this).

Other problems occur like what happened to Terracoin, a single powerful miner ruined the gradual difficulty curve forcing a correction just so GPU folks could mine again. The only alt-coin survivors will be those that are actually fundamentally different and mined different. Like this project, Litecoin with a Scrypt hashing algo and large coin base, and BTC as the king of SHA256, these distinctions actually try to improve on things instead of starting a 1:1 copy, like Byte(myass)coin.

Best of luck with this Tacotime, look forward to mining some MC2, which for my 2 cents:

ZeitCoin   (fan of Zeitgeist Movement to free the world of the financial shackles)
Cryptoons   (crypto doubloons)
Mazuma(coin?)



...Eh, Im just spitballin here  Whatever it is called it sounds interesting, look forward to more.

[Yurizhai]

So I've never mined solo before. Ever. I've never had the pleasure of discovering a block on my own and getting a whole bunch of coins. I'm paying attention to this coin..

Can someone just post a config file of exactly what a scrypt based coin needs to mine solo in cgminer?

[Joerii]

I already refer to this project as "Metacoin" when I talk to my friends. That name works really well.

It doesn't make sense though. It's not an abstraction of a coin. It's not...a coin about a coin. It will make even less sense in a few months when there will be even more coins that differ greatly from this one.

For example, the forum contains a board called " Meta " this makes sense because it's a forum about a forum.

For metacoin to make sense, look at it like this. What does a coin do ? It stores and "moves" value. So a meta coin would need to have this function...storing and moving other coins. Which sounds like balony to me

[Cheshyr]

My only concern about Metacoin is that it's already been used as a service...

"... dedicated to bringing you Groupon-style deals from the bitcoin universe.  Athens, GA · http://www.metaco.in"

[Joerii]

Making the name end in "coin" may actually be a good idea, just so the avarage joe understands what it is
Maybe something implying how strong and safe it is.

Hardcoin
Obsidicoin
Steelcoin
Tcoin (Titaniumcoin )
Multicoin

Man I am excited about this hahah